After Hogwarts Legacy being -90% off on Steam and free on Epic, I read some reviews. So many people call it soulless which made me think of the books and I fail to understand what soul they're referring to. You could argue it's a choice to drop the reader into the wizarding world as a point that "it has always been there", but if you look up anything on wikipedia, the reference is an offhanded comment from Rowling. Do they even explain what an auror is? Of all franchises to get spin-offs, Potter would've benefited from it. Actually flesh out the world.
Aurors are the goodies who go out and capture the baddies. They work for the wizard government and you have to do exams to become one. A lot of concepts in Harry Potter are designed to appeal to children and how they understand the world. JK Rowling stated she was setting out to write the sort of books she liked to read as a young girl, and some of her greatest inspirations were children's authors like E Nesbitt,
not fantasy authors who engage in large scale worldbuilding like Tolkein or Usula Le Guinn.
Why is it that in
Five Children and It the wishes only last until sunset? When their brother gets turned eleven foot tall and the children raise money by exhibiting him, how come there are no consequences the next day? The Psammead says material wishes turn to stone, and that's where fossil bones come from because Stone Age children would always wish for food - in this universe, were there no real dinosaurs, and why did the Stone Age children always wish for meat from whole animals? In
The Phoenix and the Carpet why did the island savages have a prophecy? The clergyman who marries the Irish cook and the burglar is incorporeal from only half standing on the magic carpet, so how does he gather botanical samples on the island? How are the children able to invoke the powers of the Assyrian god Nisroch to escape the dungeon under the Euphrates? When the children travel through time with the magic amulet, they can understand everyone, so why can't the Babylonian Queen when she's brought to Edwardian London and tries to steal her jewellery back from the British Museum?
The answer is: it doesn't matter, the point of the stories is that the children go on whizzo adventures and learn some moral lessons. But I'm sure E Nesbitt, if she met a child who was a big fan, could have spun an amusing yarn to explain these seeming inconsistencies. I think that's often what JK Rowling did; she had legions of children asking questions so she came up with solutions that weren't in the books. "Why didn't someone use a time turner to stop Voldemort?" Oh, well, time turners only work a few hours back in time, anything longer than that causes really bad things to happen to witches and wizards, one time a witch got trapped in 1402 and she aged 5 centuries and died when she came back, and then a bunch of people vanished because the butterfly effect from her being in the past made them get unborn.
Rowling obviously had some notes on the world, but they weren't the Silmarillion. They didn't need to be.
